


I Woke With Her Walls Around Me

by irisesandlilies



Series: Command Me To Be Well [1]
Category: Dracula & Related Fandoms, Dracula - Bram Stoker
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Compliant, F/M, Introspection, a love affair between commas and I, gratuitous stealing from canon text, trying to convey the most earnest and undying love with words is hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:08:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26245444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisesandlilies/pseuds/irisesandlilies
Summary: He summons what fight is left in his weary soul to reach for her, call her name like it was the most reverent and tragic prayer ever spoken into existence. The dauntless will he still clung to gave her hope, whatever had left him in this state was unable to take everything from him. Mina would see to it thatnothingwas taken from her Jonathan, whatever was lost she would provide.
Relationships: Jonathan Harker/Mina Harker
Series: Command Me To Be Well [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1906552
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	I Woke With Her Walls Around Me

**Author's Note:**

> Boys, when my baby found me, I was three days on a drunken sin, I woke with her walls around [me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtdapG2ABQ0)
> 
> unbeta'd, all mistakes are my own 
> 
> I wanted to write something flowery and fervent for these two because they bring me so much joy
> 
> this is piece is inspired by a line from my other Jonathan and Mina story: _All he can fathom is light, the same light that had blinded him when she had found him waiting for her or waiting for death in Budapest._

The wards whisper as she passes. Whisper horrors and triumphs but none offer meaning to her because none take his shape, or mimic his voice. Sister Agatha leads her through corridors but Mina somehow does not need her guidance, Mina could step into any building, in any country, in any state of heartache and find Jonathan just by following the tug of his soul and the rattle of his heart in her own chest. The journey that had brought her to this place, to _him_ , reads as nothing more than a blur in her memory. The swell in her chest at the thought of him grows steady, balloons until there is no room for any other thought that does not take his shape. 

It feels to Mina like an agonizing impasse of time before they are finally reunited at his bedside.

Her beloved is so decayed from encounters with unknown horrors that Mina hardly recognizes him. A handsome face lost to lines of worry and greying fear. The lines that sully his soul and reflect in his face are endless and unforgiving. 

_All the resolution has gone out of his dear eyes, and that quiet dignity which I told you was in his face has vanished._

The ties that bind them provide a pathway for that torment, outline the direction towards Mina’s heart, and places Jonathan’s trauma neatly in her as though she had opened the cavity of her chest and welcomed it. She had, all she wants at that moment is to take all the hurt from him and stuff it inside her until he is weightless and unaffected. 

If she could not claim his horrors as her own she would gift all the strength she could summon to him. Reach into the space between her lungs, retrieve her heart, and hold it out, bleeding, to him. She wants nothing more than to tell him that she wants him to hold it, keep it beating. It always beat for him anyways. Born into a shadowed existence without the affections of a mother or father, Mina’s heart had always been waiting, Jonathan’s hands fit around it perfectly. He had held her heart just tight enough to remind her it was his after all. Now, that firm hold is compromised, something has stolen the strength right from his bones. His hands struggle to clutch limply at her heart, no matter, she will place her own hands over his and remind him just how to hold her heart until he remembers again. 

He is just shy of a corpse, lying in the bed. All the light has seemed to leave him and it wounds Mina to see him in such a way. She tries to push that pain away, swallow it roughly because she knows there is no room in the sanatorium, in his bed for her pain too. 

Despite the confusion she has been warned of, the delirium that has placed him here, so far from home, he does not fail to recognize her. He summons what fight is left in his weary soul to reach for her, call her name like it was the most reverent and tragic prayer ever spoken into existence. The dauntless will he still clung to gave her hope, whatever had left him in this state was unable to take everything from him. Mina would see to it that _nothing_ was taken from her Jonathan, whatever was lost she would provide. Ultimately she would come to learn that nothing irreplaceable had been taken from him, his love for her was never shaken. He had demonstrated that in his escape and attempt to move west, towards home, towards _her_.

In the hands that hold her soul, she can identify a sense of trepidation, knows him to be withholding the events that have left him in such a degraded state. If the horrors of the past weeks truly escape him or he keeps them concealed in a corner of himself that Mina has yet to reach and unearth, she cannot say. She will not ever ask, she trusts him with her heart and soul, and she trusts him with this too. She will only dig through his hurt to find the bits of the story that matter in healing him. If her hands come away bloody, she will not fret, not if it’s for him. 

She tells him all the sentiments she had filed away for weeks, the way she had stood at the coastline in Whitby and willed her love for him to travel across the ocean and wrap itself around him. She does not know, not yet, but the affections she had sent traveling in the wind had given him the strength to stumble back to her. She kisses him sweetly but firm, as though trying to physically convey a sense of strength to him. He leans into her touch, seems to soak up every bit of affection, and translates it into something sustaining. 

She can see past the exhaustion in his eyes, can read the cautious relief etched in the margins. As though he is still wary of his own thoughts, still waiting for his eyes to deceive him. She watches the conflict raging in his broken face, part of himself fighting with another to surrender his vigilance and sink into asylum with her. 

She attempts to settle the strife for him, presses her mouth to his again tenderly and places a promise there, “rest, my dear. You are safe now.” 

The moment he had understood his feelings towards her as unfettered love years ago, he had awarded her wholly with his trust along with his affections. That trust claims victory now, as it always would and his eyes flutter in fatigue. He settles against the pillows, taking her hand with him to mouth reverently against her knuckles with chapped and aching lips. He eventually slips back beneath the surface of an agitated rest, signified with persistent exhales of sleep against her hand, still cradled against his face. She studies his lips and their awful pallor, thinking gravely that the first time she had felt his mouth in a miserable stretch of time had been plagued by suffering and fear. 

He had been left as shards of himself and she promised him at that moment that she would collect every last bit and piece him together. With bleeding fingertips and scraped knees, she would crawl along and find the broken bits of him, and as to the jagged pieces that would no longer fit, she would take a sliver of herself and make him whole.

*

_I want to take up my life here, with our marriage_.

For Jonathan, life was henceforth to be divided into two clauses, before and after evading monsters he saw as a ghastly flicker in the back of his mind. Before and after he had jumped, her name the last word to curl his tongue and his thoughts. 

The only soul he would ever crawl back through the past for had carried herself to him in this future and that was all that mattered to Jonathan. Nothing mattered but the love Mina’s slim figure could not quite entirely encapsulate, it spilled from her, radiated to his sickbed. She was all he needed to move forward from the roaming devils he had left behind and her hands would lay the path for him. 

It is an agonizing effort to reach into himself and attempt to pluck bits of his ordeal from the shadowed parts of his soul, so he abandons any effort. Trying to recall what had watched his back as he ran home sets his brain alight and grates his nerves. The only remedy to that awful ache is Mina, impossibly bright and undaunted. He trusts her with his life, with every scrap of himself, the same way she trusts his hands with her delicate heart. There is an inseparable bond that winds between them, around their hearts and in their veins, that bond is anchored in their shared trust. He would never attempt to conceal anything from her, not when he has taken her heart and tucked it behind his own ribs. She knows this, feels this sentiment glow warm inside her. 

Jonathan’s notebook, the documents of his ordeal, serves as the only physical indication of the horrors he has lived. He never wishes to be reacquainted with them, but he offers them to Mina as an extension of his promise, a token of his unyielding trust. He trusts his Mina to navigate forward with him, but he also trusts her to uncover and hold dear his past. 

_Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to share my ignorance? Here is the book. Take it and keep it, read it if you will, but never let me know unless, indeed, some solemn duty should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake, sane or mad, recorded here_.

When he settles back against the bed he can trace the earnest devotion in her eyes, steadfast understanding that has existed between them since the moment he first found her. She assesses his words, he knows her so thoroughly, he can see her turn them over in her head. She articulates no response aloud, tucking the book beneath his pillow and leans forward to anoint her love so gently and sweet against his mouth. This is all the response he needs.

*

Mina takes the token of trust and wraps it, seals away the anguish bleeding from the pages with the ring she wears so dearly. In the same way she had bestowed her reverence upon her husband’s lips, she kisses the book. This act of dressing and guarding his past and his pain is her way of conveying sentiments he already understands. She reiterates them anyways. It is a demonstration that she would break herself, again and again, to make him whole, shine a light towards a future where he would never know such fear again.

_It would be an outward and visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each other, that I would never open it unless it were for his own dear sake or for the sake of some stern duty._

The symbolism of her gift holds just as much weight as the vows they have just exchanged. There is no way any words or any gesture could fully encompass the bounds of her love for him, that love was endless. To even begin to convey the extent of her promise now and forever, Mina had to reach into his soul and pluck the strings of his heart into a melody he could feel and hear. It’s still not enough and they will live the rest of their days attempting to translate the worship that they practice for one another. 

Mina has never once fretted that her affections have gone unseen, abandoned, and overlooked through adolescence, Mina had felt seen the moment Jonathan’s devout gaze swept across her face. Now, in the rolling hills of Budapest, he makes a point of recognizing her efforts anyways, his palms gently closing around her fingers, as though he meant to keep them safe and never let go. It is the first time he has taken her hands as his wife, the binds that entwine their souls now recognized by law and God. 

He tells her that her gift, the neatly wrapped and bound book, is the dearest thing in all the wide world. He means to say her love, her existence, her trust is the dearest thing, and she can hear it between his words and with each breath he takes. 

In reference to her love, her existence, her trust, he tells her, “I would go through all the past again to win it, if need be.” 

Mina thinks briefly that he is mistaken, that he means to say part of the past, but Jonathan has chosen his words carefully. He does not mistake any vowel of his promise, he would wander through all of time and suffer the ordeal of the castle repeatedly if only for this single moment with his wife. She is worth any adversity he will ever face, any pain that may plague him. Her love sustains him and he knows without a doubt that her love would endure any reiteration of reality, any journey through his past and his pain. 

She mistakes his words but she does not mistake the sentiment and feeling in them. 

_I had nothing to give him except myself, my life, and my trust, and that with these went my love and duty for all the days of my life. And, my dear, when he kissed me, and drew me to him with his poor weak hands, it was like a solemn pledge between us._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!


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